This Information Book Shelves Flanking The Couch, Read Now

Well, I'm to the point now where I will show you what I've done with the book shelves and couch so far. I'm sure I'll be tweaking, but here it is for now...

The book shelves are partially behind the couch. There is a matching book shelf that is shorter that I have right behind the couch. 

It wasn't tall enough for my needs, so I headed to Lowes. I finally came up with an idea to help raise the shelf via the suggestion of a Lowes employee.

They have these free pieces of wood, about two inches by however long. They use them, he told me, to help do something with the forklift. I'm sure he told me exactly what, but I don't recall. 

He said they're free to customers, and he would cut however many I wanted to my specifications. 

Free! That's speaking my language.

So that's underneath the shorter book shelf in the middle. 

So all I needed was a longer laminate piece that fairly matched the two at the end, because the short book shelf was only 33 inches wide. And I wanted 48 inches so the cow painting wouldn't be crowded. The shelf was under $10.

Israel drilled a couple of holes in the back of the tall book shelves the other day so I could thread cords through it.

I took one shelf out to accommodate lamps. They look better to me against the brown wood than against the white wall.

It was already hard to get pics before the couch got moved up a foot. So now it's really hard. But you get the idea.

I really don't have adequate light in here, so I opened the front door and turned on the lamps. Maybe at another point in the day I can turn the lamps off and get better shots.

I'm sure many of you thought I'd paint the shelves. I have few things that are stained that I want to remain that way. These shelves are one of them. 

Plus the color goes so well with my cow painting.

For once Charlie isn't on the move, so I got a quick photo of him. 

Abi says: "Hey, me, me, me!" And so I stop to take a photo of her.

I think what I need on the shorter shelf behind the couch is another plant. It seems to need something from nature.

So if you want a shelf behind your couch, it is doable. It doesn't have to look too spiffy because who's going to see it with the couch hiding it? And if you need to raise it higher, there are ways to do that as well.

This made my couch, across from my white dresser and two wicker chairs opposite, almost the exact same space apart. Which is what they call a good conversational grouping.

I brought the white trunk in from the bedroom because it just seemed to need something white with a little more bulk there. It isn't an exact science of course!

I'll be showing more changes that resulted from this one later in the week.